WIlliam Bayer - Pattern crimes

David drove Dov Meltzer down to Ben-Gurion Airport, waited while he cleared customs, then escorted him onto the plane.

Dov looked nervous. "I've got reserve duty coming up, so maybe I won't come back. Maybe I'll join the traitors driving taxis around New York."

David leaned over the seat. "Find me something, Dov. Investigate the hell out of this. Because Latsky's right, I am floundering. I'm not sure what I'm doing anymore."

He and Micha drove out to the Negev to look at the earthwork. After half an hour of trudging around it, Micha gave his verdict: "I see why they call it 'Circle in the Square.' But you know something, David-it's a crock of shit."

"So why's everyone so concerned about it? What's Cohen's involvement? Why is Sokolov acting panicked? If Targov's right and Sokolov didn't design it, why pay him good money to sign the plans?"

Micha looked at him. "There's something going on."

"That's right, but what? I want to know. Use your contacts, Micha. Find out who authorized this thing. No one lives around here. There's no decent road in, and when you get here there's nothing to see. So if it's really just a crock of shit, then what the hell's the point?"

Liederman wanted to go down to Tel Aviv: "To try and find that Arab kid," he explained. "You know, the one Peretz picked up off the beach. If I could find him I could bring him up here and then try to sick him onto Cohen. Dangle him, you know. Maybe Cohen would bite."

"Forget it," David said. "He's too smart to bite an Arab."

But later he realized Moshe Liederman had begun to think like a detective. He was getting hunches, following them up, and he'd grasped the basic method of entrapment-finding the suspect's weak spot and then exploiting it by dangling bait.

H e told Anna: "I'd like to have some photographs of Cohen together with a man. Then I'd haul him in, and, if he refused to cooperate, I'd threaten to show them to his wife."

"David! You wouldn't do that!"

"No, of course not," he said. "But I sure as hell wouldn't hesitate to make the threat."

Uri found the panel door through a garage in Netanya that specialized in Chevrolets. The foreman of the body shop remembered replacing the door, and directed Uri to a junkyard further down the coast. Here Uri made his way between carcasses of demolished Fords and torn-up Fiats, broken axels, shattered windshields, smashed-in radiators, and assorted burned-out truck engines crusted with grease and dirt. It took him two days but he finally found the panel door, and when David sent it over to the forensic lab at National Police H.Q., they were able to match paint marks in the dents with scrapings of paint taken from Schneiderman's truck.

"All of which proves," Rafi said, "that Schneiderman hit a van. But doesn't prove it was the van in Ein Kerem."

"Maybe not," David said, "but I never counted on establishing a solid chain of evidence."

"Then why did you go to so much trouble, David?"

"Confirmation. You see, Rafi-now I know I'm right."

Dov's first call came through in seventy-two hours: "Think it's hot in Jerusalem. You should see the way we're sweating here."

"What have you got?"

"First, and this wasn't hard, Holyland Arts is owned by a Texas corporation called Militants for Christ, Inc. It's a spin-off of an Oklahoma oil company. The sole owner is a certain Harrison Stone, a big-deal oil and gas multimillionaire. He's also a part-time TV preacher-cool, soft-spoken, and very very slick. Around here they call him 'The Wizard of Ooze.' Some kind of local joke-I don't get it, but what the hell. Anyway, though Stone's certainly a fundamentalist, he's not a fire-and-damnation type. Makes his TV sermons in a cool reasonable tone of voice from behind a corporate desk. Something interesting: There's no church-no staff, no building, no parishioners. It's a private philanthropy and strictly a one-man show. And according to people in the Jewish community, Stone's a very big fan of Israel."

"Has he been here?"

"Plenty of times. Trouble is I can't find out exactly when. But get this, David-he's also a close pal of Rabbi Katzer. Katzer was here last year soliciting funds, and not, I hear, just from local Jews. Stone supposedly arranged several very private meetings between Katzer and wealthy Texan Christian fundamentalists. Pledges of serious money are rumored to have been made in exchange for unspecified promises. It's all kind of vague, no one knows exactly what went on, but from the little I've been able to uncover I'd have to say your conspiracy theory is looking good."

David felt a rush of excitement; a little more of the concealed pattern had been revealed. "How did you dig all this up so fast?"

"I had help from a local lady reporter name of Gael Rubin. She wrote a series of articles on Stone, something very difficult to do because it's almost impossible to get near the guy. He's a take-over specialist who operates with a lot of secrecy."

"What do you think?"

"Don't know yet. But the operation here doesn't fit with those crummy offices we saw."

"You got pictures?"

"I shot some off the TV."

"Have the consulate wire them to me. So-what does your pretty reporter girl say?"

"Did I say she was pretty, David?"

"She is, isn't she?"

"Yeah, she is." Dov laughed. "And she says Stone is sinister. Says that except for the religious stuff he plays it quiet, stays in the background, always works through proxies. Then, when he's ready to gobble something up, he strikes out of nowhere like a shark."

He told her: "Here I am working on a murder case that in some tangential way involves my brother, my father, and myself. And now it seems to involve you too. Your old lover has somehow stumbled into some strange back room of it. At least I think he has. So many intersections…" He shook his head. "I think this could only happen here. Only here, Anna, in Jerusalem…"

Micha confirmed that Holyland Arts had funded the design of "Circle in the Square" and that Israeli military engineers had done the actual work, paid for out of an IDF cultural and recreational fund.

"Far as I can tell, no specific individual authorized it. The way it works with this fund is that once properly prepared papers are filed in the appropriate manner they get shuffled through the bureaucracy from desk to desk. Each officer adds his initials and several months later the project comes out the other end approved."

"If that's how it works then I pity Israel," David said. But still he wasn't satisfied. "Bring in Sokolov," he instructed Micha. "Time now to put him on the grill."

There was something about the old man that filled David with ambivalence. His face bore the stamp of vulnerability one saw often in the older generation of European-born Israelis. The look of internal disturbance, of having been deeply and indelibly wounded in the past, totally opposed to the famous "Sabra look"-the strong, set, committed features and direct unblinking gaze. A disturbed face but David knew he must distrust his sympathy. Often those who looked most disturbed had been deformed in sinister ways.

Was Sergei evil? Targov had told Anna that he was, but examining him now, across the small table in the tiny basement interrogation room, David could not be sure. There was pathos in the taut forehead, the terrible teeth, the bushes of white hair that sprang Ben-Gurion style from the sides of his shriveled head. His eyes, greatly magnified by his extra-thick spectacles, were frightened. No wonder-he had received an official summons; the man had spent fifteen years in Soviet camps.

Still, there was a hint of craftiness that belied the injured stare. David recognized the face of a man who could channel his hurt into a mercenary rage. He knew the type-the cheater, the stealer, the professional litigant, the man who behaves as if money can salve his wounds.